Monday, October 25, 2004

Home Sweet Home

We're back from our visit to Washington D.C. I wish I could talk more about it, but most of the details are classified...

But here are a few of the things I'd have been posting if I had been here.

The Cardinals win the pennant! The Cardinals win the pennant!

The Cardinals then lose two straight dreadful games to the Boston Red Sox in the World Series. They're not getting clutch hitting right now, and are leaving tons of runners in scoring position. The way they're playing right now makes one wonder "How did this team win 105 games this year, let alone make it to the World Series?"

Things will be much different in St. Louis tomorrow night. The heart of the Cardinals order is too good to be silent on home turf with 51,000 Cards fans (the best in baseball) going nuts.

On Wednesday night at Game Four, my son and I will be two of those 51,000 fans. An old family friend came through and scored two box seats on the third base side for us. We're flying up Wednesday and flying home Thursday. It's an extravagance far beyond anything that normally happens in my family, but as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, you only get one chance to be twelve years old and see your team play in the World Series, so I'm doing whatever I have to do to get my son up there.

I'm not even going to talk about the Rams. Pitiful. Absolutely pitiful.

Up until last week, the only time I had ever visited Washington D.C. purely as a tourist (Whoops! There goes the intrigue...) was on a school field trip when I was in 8th grade in 1983. I saw exactly one "celebrity" there (and haven't seen another since): Pierre Salinger. Salinger, who had been press secretary under President John F. Kennedy, was by then a correspondent on ABC's "20/20," and was filming a stand-up outside of one of the Smithsonian museums on the National Mall.

This week--21 years later--as the family and I were touring Arlington National cemetery on Thursday, a funeral procession came rolling through. As it turned out, it was the funeral procession for...Pierre Salinger.

Weird.

Anyway, it's good to be back where it's nice and warm again. Is the election still on? Ah, I see it is. I'm sure there will be a few political observations this week as I get re-acclimated.